It all started on this post.
A user found a Facebook group where you can basically buy any shiny pokemon from Special Research, either in pogo or through a Home transfer. One of the members claims a Niantic employee is helping them, adding old special research tasks to their accounts, letting them farm shinies and good iv’s by completing the same tasks over and over again.
OP began being harassed by some of these individuals here on Reddit.
Another user cross-posted the thread on r/pokemonhome and is being harassed too. That user is now shadow banned on Reddit, probably because this group is mass-reporting their account.
This goes beyond ordinary drama; it’s starting to feel like some sketchy network that a Niantic dev might be tied up in. I’m not saying any of the claims being made are true, but their behavior is definitely suspicious and harmful, more than just a simple hoax. Niantic should look into this.
by kaiserdrache
25 Comments
Why would you even buy a Pokémon for a lot of money?
The point of playing a game is to……well…..play it
To use money to have someone else do it for me just sounds pointless and boring
The fact that there is a Pokemon trading economy using real money is weird to me in the first place.
Yeah, that’s the reason why no one fixes the bugs. They are busy doing their side businesses.
A real life Team Rocket scheme, that’s pretty wild.
Jesus christ this is disgusting.
Great breakdown explanation, OP! Sad to see the behavior of the group as well as Home Mods deleting the post.
This was posted here yesterday and the mods removed it for some reason lol
Hopefuly this one stays
We would need either youtubers to speak about it or pokemon go media to get niantic’s attention
Yeah I saw this yesterday and read the comments earlier. it doesn’t matter if you believe it’s false or not if people are harassing and threatening people who post it’s basically guaranteed to be true, even though whoever the poster is didn’t actually show a single name or anything to link any one person, it seams like some involved accidentally outed themselves in the comments.
Prepare for trouble. And make it double
It would actually be kind of cool if they made a library of old research you could buy again from the actual shop. Probably generate a lot of revenue.
I guess if this is true (that a staff can get you any Pokémon), it would completely destroys the “Pokémon transferred from Pogo to Home is certified genuine” market
There are multiple discords in the UK where they have a niantic employee contact who can put missed special reseaech onto your acocunt, change mons IVs, force lucky etc.
They charge stupid stupid money as I guess he isn’t risking his job for pennies on the pound and obviously the discord admins are making their ridiculous mark up too.
I actually got banned from one for talking about it on Facebook.
https://preview.redd.it/mmk3zwveof3g1.jpeg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=692189ca504e5cb3fcab2b53a68bc2bfaf1760ca
Key takeaways from this are:
* Seems to be possible to inject old researches into old Pogo accounts, allowing for the acquisition of extremely rare research-exclusive pokemon (like apex ho-oh)/low level (like Gl-eligible Buzzwole)/certain balls catchable (like ultra beast researches in beast balls/poke balls), even on accounts that never paid for or acquired these researches. Allegedly possible to inject auto-completed and repeatedly to farm for shinies/IVs.
* Additionally, a modified client is able to catch poke-ball exclusive mythicals in other available balls which is normally not possible (outside of a few during a glitch a few years back,) such as Safari ball Celebi.
* All of these services are being offered at an extremely high price from said individuals on a black market.
* Whistleblowers are being harassed and threatened.
Whether this is an Niantic employee or a security flaw, **none** of it is ok, and people should absolutely be aware to avoid potentially hacked mons like this, and a proper investigation needs to be done, with these methods patched out and any participating accounts permabanned.
This seems par for the course for niantic, most recently banning legit players, meanwhile they have employees selling pokemon encounters to players? Usually this kind of thing spells the end for games, or at least facilitates new ownership. Maybe scopely will be better? Or maybe they are the culprit. True or false info aside we may never know the answer to how far this goes
Crazy. At this point they should let anyone buy older quests or Pokemon
Meowth that’s right
These same employees have access to all our (PoGo Players) data (most importantly location). Isn’t that nice? Still glad it was sold to Saudi…. I mean Scopely?
So we can get a free shiny back to back because some devs can do it but getting a real human in chat support is basically non existent? Wow
Then there is people getting banned randomly for niantic errors..
Finally this got out, this has been going on for months now, apparently people have been paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars for the injection of multiple research shiny mythicals, armored mewtwo, basically anything that was from a special research or different forms of pokemon that appeared in those researches.
Hopefully something is done about it before this becomes a wide know thing, some modded client devs are already looking to replicate it.
Apparently it’s not just hacked Pokemon, they can skip trainer levels (especially those annoying TL 70+ research tasks) for you too.
Doesn’t have to be a high-ranking employee either. Niantic Support (once you reach a human) can do anything to your account. The vast majority of them just won’t admit it because they’re supposed to serve Niantic’s financial interests and want to keep their jobs.
This is also how the level 80 hack happened, people paid for them to skip the timegated parts of the research.
Someone getting fired BIG time if true. 🤣
Thank you for your post ,this has brought much more light to this topic.
and I would also like to state that I have much more proof of all this I just couldn’t post more than 20 images.
I applaud all that who have provided evidence and commented civilly, it is fine to be skeptical as long as it is not negative as that does not help any situation.